Ted Cruz has not really registered much with the public in the UK. But anybody feeling comforted by his apparently making ground against Donald Trump is in for a shock. Cruz is on the right wing fringes even in the United States – so much so that John McCain called him a “wacko”. He is an avid climate change denier, wishes to increase US military interventions abroad, wants to criminalise abortion and supports control of the internet – he described net neutrality as “Obamacare for the internet”.

It is therefore interesting that the Chairman of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is one Chad Sweet, who is also a Director of the Quilliam Foundation USA, established by its British counterpart.

The Quilliam Foundation is a group led by people who claim to be former Islamic jihadists who have now reformed. It is the go-to organisation for the BBC and Murdoch’s Sky News whenever Islamic matters, and particularly terrorism, are aired on the media. It is presented, quite falsely, as a neutral and technocratic organisation.

It is in fact deeply sinister. While it has provided a lifestyle of champagne and well-cut silk suits for its “ex-jihadist” directors, it has pandered to right wing Islamophobia in every statement it has ever made. It received millions of pounds of UK government funding, not very well accounted for, and employs “ex” members of MI6. I have it from a very good security source that funding comes from the CIA, and there is certainly an open stream of funding from far right American bodies.

Quilliam were involved by the government as “experts” in drawing up the government’s Prevent strategy, which directly seeks to curtail expression of “radical” opinion in British universities and seeks to place a spy in every classroom. It has led, among scores of such incidents, to the arrest and detention of a Muslim student of security studies for reading a book on terrorism in Nottinghamshire University Library, and the police being sent to an eight year old Muslim child’s home because the teacher heard him use the word terrorism. Only last week the National Union of Teachers took a definitive stand against the Prevent strategy.

There is no doubt the air of anti-Muslim paranoia Prevent inculcates will increase resentment and alienation among young Muslims, which is the opposite of what is sensible. But the corporate media can always call up the “experts” of the Quilliam Foundation when they want the government line to be supported.

The link between Quilliam and Cruz does not surprise me in the least, but is completely contrary to the official image of Quilliam as presented by the media.

Their support for Prevent is of a piece with their contempt for freedom of speech. After I first criticised Quilliam, I received a telephone call from one of their staff attempting to get my personal financial details, including account numbers, by pretending to be making a donation. They also tried to get this blog closed down by attempting legal action against its hosts.

The nexus of far right interests, and their reach, is ever fascinating. I guess we all pray for Bernie Sanders.

Cruz is an extraordinarily nasty piece of work.
And he represents the very worst elements in the Republican party.
But, happily, he was born in Canada of a father who was a Cuban citizen, albeit one in full flight from governmental decency and social justice. There is no way on earth that he qualifies as a “native born” citizen of the US and becomes eligible for the Presidency.

You are right. Please tell me, now, what you imagine that the Constitutional Convention meant by the words “natural born?”
Were they guarding against the products of Caesarian Sections? Or clones? Or ‘test tube’ babies?

They clearly meant ‘born within the boundaries of the USA ‘. And Cruz was not. Nor was his father.

First it gets warm and the North Pole melts. That stops the Gulf Stream from flowing. That then causes another ice age. Then we will def need a lot of fossil fuel. That’s the Koch bros endgame.

Cruz’s eligibility could be contested at Supreme Court but per congressionally- passed law defining that ambiguous constitutional clause he is considered eligible. The constitutionality of that law has never been tested, however. And so there’s the rub: 4:4 Supreme Court tie lets Cruz sail in. Professor at Quinnipiac School of Law wrote article on this

Craig, you make the same mistake as all those other “hide the real science” brigade (or climate alarmists). No-one can deny climate change. Cruz (and i’m no fan of his politics), and many others, deny that CO2 causes CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming). This is not denying Climate Change.
If you continue to refer to people like this as Climate Change deniers you are simply parroting the MSM’s increasingly biased and politicised mantra of “Human Bad, Nature Good”.
Equally, Climate Change cannot be believed in. Science is not a faith based topic, as Religion is, and requires a much much better understanding than we are currently prepared to admit. The understanding comes from experimentation and investigation. Not from theoretical cogitation, although currently, sadly, this passes as science.

That turns out not to be the case. It may perhaps be true that no one can deny climate change without being mocked and abused, but many highly intelligent and very well qualified people do “deny” it. That’s because it is a question of science, in which numbers and authority count for nothing – just being right. Before 1543 a tiny number of people believed that the Earth goes round the Sun, rather than vice versa – but they were right and millions of others (including the Pope, and all the world’s leading scholars) were plain wrong.

Try this article, which gives a brief account of how Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most distinguished mathematical physicists not only “denies climate change”, he asserts that ‘[i]ncreasing CO2 in the atmosphere does more good than harm… and humanity doesn’t face an existential crisis. Climate change, he tells us, “is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?”‘

OK, if you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about you can deny climate change. Agreed.

No intelligent, knowledgeable person denies climate change. The MSM might call them such, but they do not.

Before 1945 many erudite, intelligent and well-known professional people thought Eugenics was the way forward. Hmmm…sometimes people are just wrong, but are unable to actually admit it. In this case no-one said a dickie bird about it because it was, in the end, abhorrent.

Freeman Dyson has cleaned more knowledge from under his little finger nail than you, and most other people, are ever likely to amass and understand in your whole lifetime. He says what he says because, me old fruit bat, he is, essentially, correct. And, although you wont believe it, the science supports his assertions.

I know, blasphemy blasphemy, they’ve all got it….wait, that doesn’t work does it…oh.

I should say that I am a practicing scientist and have worked and published in the field of air quality for almost 30 years. I remember when we worried about the coming ice age. Funny how things change, eh.

“I remember when we worried about the coming ice age. Funny how things change, eh”.

Yes, very funny. Especially since that final remark undermines your entire comment. You seem to admit that you used to worry about global cooling, yet now you insist that no one must deny global warming. Even though you yourself were obviously completely wrong about global cooling. You’ve been wrong before, it seems, but you are absolutely certain you are not wrong now.

Cruz believes that carbon dioxide (CO2) “is good for plant life,” that the planet “is greener right now” than in the past, and that “for significant periods in history, prior to the industrial revolution, there has been markedly more CO2 in our atmosphere that could not have come from the burning of fossil fuels.” He also believes that “for the past 18 years … there has been no significant warming whatsoever” and that the current computer models used to understand global climate trends “are profoundly wrong … and inconsistent with the evidence and the data.”

On all points Cruz is correct, which is not to say that that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is nothing to worry about, or that there is no human impact on climate mediated both by carbon dioxide, other atmospheric pollutants, and land surface changes (e.g., deforestation, urbanization)

On the contrary, the consequences seem dire. For example, massive and already measurable enhancement of plant growth in response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration means more food, and hence more people. Africa’s population is already headed for 2.5 billion by 2050. As the Sahel and perhaps the Sahara goes green, look for five billion Africans by 2100. Another consequence of rising carbon dioxide concentration is a potentially catastrophic impact on human cognition.

I myself believe Craig is literally acknowledging the loudest dissenting voices that entangle global warming with climate change and not the science. There is clear evidence that over the past seventeen years, the global temperature has risen. This to me shows warming of the climate system is unequivocal and the scale of this increase over time is key in climate modelling.

An assortment of organizations, often tied to the oil industry, spent about $560 million between 2003 and 2010 to fund groups that deny climate change per se, many with links to sympathetic media and politicians [source: Drexel University].

Let’s put it this way: Cruz does not believe in Science if any sort. He holds that the earth is a little over six thousand years old that the book of Genesis explains the origins of mankind and that if rich donors have investments in fossil fuels it is his job to deny that global warming caused by industrial pollutants ought to be controlled.
He is a nut case, which precise kind of nut, whether pecan or walnut, hazel or chestnut I will leave it to Dr Nobby and Anon1 to work out. Perhaps our Kebab warmer will come up with a borrowed chestnut or two.

The interesting thing is that Hillary Clinton is crashing and burning. If she loses in Sanders’ home state New York it will all be over for her and the oligarchy which has run the Democratic party since 1986.
To put the Wisconsin result in perspective one has to understand that Clinton’s delegates have been elected either in states run by machines in the Deep South- on low turnouts and involving the traditional exchange of favours (and money) for a local Church’s congregation or a boatload of postal ballots.
Or, as was the case in Arizona, Massachussets and Nevada after elections in which irregularities were brazen and legion. What happened in Arizona is, even in the USA, a national scandal.
To put it briefly: Clinton’s campaign has been an expensive disaster, a complete failure. There is no enthusiasm for her, ‘victory’ after ‘victory’ ha created no momentum for her and the electorate is waking up to the fact that her ‘record’ from support of mass incarceration and prison privatisation to Libya, Syria, Honduras and Haiti has been horrendous.
If she were to run against Cruz it would be the dream contest between America’s least liked man and least trusted woman. But that won’t happen. Sanders should win in New York and, after that it will be plain sailing, through Caifornia, to the Convention ( I hope he has a bullet proof vest).
Superdelegates who stand out against the elected sort will be rare.
Look forward to the most exciting contest since 1896 when William Jennings Bryan (check Vachel Lindsay’s poem) set the country alight.
But lost.

I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American Poet who could sing outdoors,
He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendor,
Wild roses from the plains, that made hearts tender,
All the funny circus silks
Of politics unfurled,
Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,
And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.

Others have already said this but I think your use of the term ‘climate change denier’ is sad and unfortunate. Genuine scientists experiment and question – they don’t accept assertions based on faith and/or propaganda alone. The papers leaked from the University of East Anglia showed beyond reasonable doubt that prime movers and shakers within the climate change industry (and it’s become a billion-dollar industry with the ‘Carbon’-trading asset bubble – forgive me if I don’t have confidence in scientists who are unable to tell a solid solitary element from a gaseous compound) have committed conscious and willful fraud. I wonder what the folks at Anthony Watts’s blog would feel about your wholesale dismissal of their concerns? Do you approve of Loretta Lynch’s new inquisition I wonder?

No they didn’t. 99.99% of the emails from the University of East Anglia confirmed their findings. One or two were badly worded and could be twisted by climate change deniers who’s opinions are faith based and have no regard for scientific method.

He Believes, Fred. Please do not question his Faith. Agree, and in any case, the data (Believers don’t need data) emerging since is beginning to make the UEA output at that time look a little bit optimistic.

Perfect illustration of the way your colonial administration works. CIA is the covenanted civil service, Quilliam are some of their Western-Oriented Gentlemen. But for the dirty work CIA uses assets of foreign intelligence agencies as cutouts. With subsequent less artificial leaks, these will come swarming out of the woodwork. Here’s an example from Romania’s colonial administration, where the natives are restless.

Ted Cruz is the kind of scum that is ready to start the third world war, soon as he can get his fingers on the button, anyone taking a closer look at Ted they can see the puppeteers hand right up there conducting Ted.

On the subject of prevent here is a rare article that has gone widely noticed:

…. the allocation of Prevent funding, which was based on the number of Muslims in a local authority. This explicit targeting demonstrates that Islamophobia is central in shaping how the government (and wider society) define and construct extremism and terrorism as solely Islamic problems.

This is combined with the fact that the arc of instability spanning the south Asia and Mid east is further coming under attack by a constant stream of racist apartheid policies of the unhinged zionists, the latest of which is the segregation of Arab women from the Jewish women in maternity wards, as suggested by Betzalel Smotrich, a 36-year-old member of parliament from the Jewish Home party. Before anyone jumping to point out; ah but…… they should note that a poll taken last month in zionistan shows that fifty percent of the Jewish population want to strip the Arabs in zionistan from their nationality and kick out the said Arabs out of zionistan!

That’s the big question regarding Republican candidates for president this year: Assuming “does not play well with others” is exactly the quality you want in a Republican president, which one of them plays with others the worst? And is that enough to offset any difference in their ability to get elected in the first place?

My guess:
– Plays well with others is a toss-up.
– Cruz is more likely to get elected in the general election.

Jonathan Russell is Quilliam’s Political Liaison Officer and joined the organisation in 2012. He holds a BA in Arabic, German and Persian from the University of Exeter and an MSc in the History of International Relations at the London School of Economics. At Quilliam, he campaigns for cross-party commitment to human rights in counter-terrorism legislation and policy and runs a project to promote clarity, consistency and cohesion in counter-extremism policy across the EU.

Quilliam is reportedly affiliated to the AIPAC-spawned WINEP, and to the Henry Jackson Society:

Seriously? Linking to Tony Blair? He must have been very concerned about all of those carbon dioxide emissions created by his wars of aggression. I wonder how much CO2 the sorties over Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yugoslavia and Yemen have unleashed to create havoc upon the climate?

Buck Moody, you’ve never read IPCC Chapter 8. You wouldn’t know a GCM from a bar of soap. You couldn’t solve a first-order linear diffy Q, much less grasp the numerical methods and statistics involved. Why should we give a shit what you think?

Dear Mr. Fun with Crackpots: appeals to authority and ad hominem attacks are all you alarmists seem to have. That, and outlawing dissent. Rajendra Pachauri said upon his resignation from the IPCC: “this is my religion, this is my dharma”. This man headed the IPCC! A supposedly scientific body. I must have missed the meeting where scepticism and the demand for replicable experiments stopped being part of the scientific method. I don’t care if you give a shit what I think. I think you are full of shit.

A railway engineer, a sex-pest, and a steel magnate who did very well out of relocating his steel plant to his native India by taking advantage of Carbon Credits. You do know that Michael Mann lost his libel case in BC?

I’m not a climate ‘scientist’ trying to convince everyone of impending doom if they don’t live as I say and stuff money in my pocket. The burden of proof isn’t on me. It’s on those pushing this theory. Computer models that fail their short-term predictions and are subsequently fed with their own output data don’t meet the criteria of an acceptable assessment methodology.

If you can’t point out specific IPCC model assumptions or relationships that should be changed, then fuck off, because your solipsistic mental masturbation has no bearing on the premise of climate change, which is a set of model runs and nothing more.

And you can’t, can you?

When someone says the sky is blue and you say but ice cream doesn’t have bones, educated people will ignore you. Get used to it.

You seem to have a lot of confidence in ‘a set of model runs and nothing more’. So much so that you’re defensive to the point of being abusive. I can only approach this subject from a political angle, if that’s ‘solipsistic mental masturbation’ to you, then I recommend you study some history as well as very recent ‘climate science’.

Your ‘political’ ad hominems can’t make up for being innumerate and wilfully ignorant. You’re still talking out your ass. Nicomachus was a pederastic slave-owner so that proves 2 + 2 = 5. Your arguments show that the most important factor in global warming is the Dunning-Kruger effect. So once again, slowly: If you can’t explain why the IPCC GCM is wrong, fuck off. Come back when you know what we’re talking about.

Who is this ‘we’ FwC’? I don’t see any discussion about the details of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change being posted in this thread at all. Neither proof nor reason. Just assertion, aggression and insults.

Pray for democracy because the two-party system has sold it for seven pieces of silver. Even if by some miracle Sanders moves into the WH, the marketers in Congress will ham-string the little Co;onel and the only control over social change he will exercise is staffing the kitchen and approving the menus.

Any mileage in the idea that Cruz is only marginally less disliked by the GOP than Trump, and that another candidate will emerge at the convention? Sure it’s not democracy as we know it, but it might avoid a nuclear holocaust…

Republican demographics….Trump-blue. Hawaii used to be a different blue, but they’ve been inundated by Mid-Western state homeless, sent there out of compassion by one-way air fare so they don’t freeze in the Winter. 🙂

Resulting in evacuation of 90 people and road closures, whilst Darth Vader lookalike bomb disposal team rush to the scene to dispose of the ticking and buzzing device that had been reported. The intrepid bomb disposal dude then emerges with a penis ring vibrator that had been discarded in the men’s toilets bins.

The bizarre saga ends with the stand down of the security personnel but the “offender” who had discarded the penis ring, and whose identity has not been released is to be investigated to ascertain why he disposed of the penis ring, in the said bin?

Moral of the story if there is no bomb then the next best thing is to catch the culprit who throw away his sex toy and prosecute the swine for going armed and equipped to cause mayhem!!

Sadly no longer “you cannot make this shit up” is applicable given the frequency of the application of the full security detail adorned with masks and light sub machine guns to boot, to attend to any odd incident.

What your post clarified is that people are – thankfully – vigilant about the possibility of terrorist attack and that the services charged with protecting the public against such acts are able to react swiftly and efficiently.

It’s somewhat ironic that the neo-cons bang-on about religious nutters like ISIS (which are a creation of the neo-cons), while at the same time Capitol Hill and the Pentagon is infested with equally crazy religious nutters, and these nutters have their finger on the nuclear button.

How about those who see the way Habbabkuk takes it upon himself to use a bullying demeanor against those without the knowledge to answer him back, whilst refusing to answer any reasonable questions he is asked?

Cruz’s father – a swivel-eyed religious fanatic – actually thinks his son is the second coming of Christ, here to lead the world to Armageddon paradise on Earth, and invited some crazed pastor on stage to announce this at some rallies.

There is not a more dangerous lunatic currently running for office than Cruz, which is saying something – he’s up against some stiff competition. He is far more ideologically wedded to the extreme right than Trump, far more authoritarian, and Cruz actually is the more serious threat by a long way. Trump is a blow-hard and holds fascistic tendencies, but is not entirely sold out and remains open on a number of issues (including health-care). Cruz is of the “let them starve!” school of corporate Christian fascism.

Have you not been called “wacko” yourself? Do you think it is anything more than a smear as is the term “climate denier”? And is not the term “denier” an attempt to link a person with Holocaust denial?

I do not know anything about Cruz and I doubt if you do either beyond what you have blogged here.

I doubt if you know anything about climate science. Below is a link to a blog post by Andrew Montford, not a man with whom I have much agreement. The usefulness (to me) of this post is that it makes clear that it is politicians that drive approaches to climate change.

Craig wrote some time ago that he had serious doubts himself. But when you’re writing to satisfy your lefty followers you have to get in ‘climate change denier’ along with nasty, racist, far-right, islamophobe etc.

From its beginning, the mission of the SOA has been to train soldiers to protect the interests of multinational corporations and maintain the economic status quo for the few rich and powerful in the US and their cohorts in Latin America. Labor leaders and union organizers have always been among the primary targets of SOA violence.

“Their support for Prevent is of a piece with their contempt for freedom of speech. After I first criticised Quilliam, I received a telephone call from one of their staff attempting to get my personal financial details, including account numbers, by pretending to be making a donation. They also tried to get this blog closed down by attempting legal action against its hosts.”

Yes, this is a very nasty organisation with a lot of muscle and funding from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as well as the UK taxpayer. It also receives funding from Kuwait, and as Ba’al has pointed out shares information with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Independent it is not. It’s mission is to target Islam as was witnessed recently on BBC’s Sunday morning faith programme The Big Questions in which the vast bulk of space was given to a Quilliams director, Adam Deen, whose anti-Islamic views were all too evident.

Like the Tony Blair foundation it is not easy to find where all the funding comes from but it has denied receiving UK taxpayers’ money (a blatant lie).

While on the subject of funding it is interesting to note that Zero-Hedge has revealed that funding for the Panama Mossack Fonsenca disclosure has been sourced to George Soros agents. Where else? These creatures need to be removed from power.

These are all interesting, but this was the one I had read and have been looking for. Read this. Its not a conspiracy web site story. The story is by The Economist this year. Bloomberg has been investigating as well. Read and think.

“DEVIN NUNES raised eyebrows in 2013 when, as chairman of a congressional working group on tax, he urged reforms that would make America “the largest tax haven in human history….

America seems not to feel bound by the global rules being crafted as a result of its own war on tax-dodging. It is also failing to tackle the anonymous shell companies often used to hide money. The Tax Justice Network, a lobby group, calls the United States one of the world’s top three “secrecy jurisdictions”, behind Switzerland and Hong Kong…..

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), passed in 2010, is the main shackle that America puts on other countries….

FATCA has spawned the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), a transparency initiative overseen by the OECD club of 34 countries that is emerging as a standard for the exchange of data for tax purposes. So far 96 countries, including Switzerland, once favoured by rich taxophobes, have signed up and will soon start swapping information…..

America sees no need to join the CRS……

No one knows how much undeclared money is stashed offshore. Estimates range from a couple of trillion dollars to $30 trillion. What is clear is that America’s share is growing. Already the largest location for managing foreign wealth, it has picked up business as regulators have increased information-exchange and scrutiny of banks and trust companies in Europe and the Caribbean. Money is said to be flowing in from the Bahamas and Bermuda, as well as from Switzerland…..

America is much safer for legally earned wealth that is evading taxes than for lucre that was filthy from the start. It has shown little appetite for helping enforce foreign tax laws and, unlike some other countries, does not count the banking of undeclared money as money-laundering. “Foreigners looking to evade tax in America are usually safe because of its secrecy,” says Jason Sharman of Griffith University in Australia. “But for those with dirtier money there is a small though real risk the US will investigate and apply the full force of the law, which is a scary prospect.”